Inside Rick Alexander's Sound-for-Picture Career: From Michael Jordan to NASA

For over four decades, Rick Alexander has been capturing the sounds that bring stories to life. From recording music legends like Rod Temperton to mixing audio for NASA launches and ESPN documentaries, his career has spanned industries, innovations, and iconic moments. A longtime Lectrosonics user, he has relied on his wireless kit in everything from hurricane coverage to high-speed race tracks.

A Lectrosonics user since the early 1990s, he maintains a Digital Hybrid Wireless kit that’s ready for anything. It includes SMV, SMQV, and SMWB transmitters, UCR411a and SR-series receivers, and LT-LR pairs for hops and communications. In situations where RF transmission is simply impractical, a PDR timecode recorder rides with the subject.

Here, he shares insights into his journey, the evolution of production sound, and why his gear has never let him down – even in the harshest conditions.

How did you get your start in production?

I freelanced at a PBS studio in Louisville [Kentucky] and the place was huge, practically a soundstage. You could divide it in half and do two productions at the same time. I was getting into broadcast, doing things like the Kentucky Derby. When I moved to Florida to attend Full Sail recording school, I first worked at NPR in Orlando. 

Full Sail got a call looking for a monitor engineer for the country artist John Conlee. Doing that gig, there was this guy standing over my shoulder. Turned out, he owned a sound company that had a contract for some major nightclub venues, and they were turning over front-of-house engineers like crazy. This was before places like House of Blues, so these clubs were getting all the big acts. 

I went in and just listened for two or three weeks without anyone knowing I was there. I wound up doing half a show for Edgar Winter, who had just fired almost all his crew.

When did you pivot into production sound for films and television?

One big tipping point was this: Johnnie Wilder of Heatwave had been paralysed from the neck down in a car accident in 1979. In the 1980s, they shot a spot for PBS showing how Johnnie could control his Macintosh computer with a headset that read facial movements. 

It turned into this five-minute sort of pitch-deck video. We sent it to Apple, and Alan Brightman, who was their VP of Accessibility at the time, loved it. They invited us to film their exhibits at conventions like Closing the Gap, a big trade show about assistive technology. That got us into mixing sound for video of live events.

A business reason I moved into production mixing was that chains like House of Blues and Hard Rock Café started inking exclusive deals with artists to play only their venues in any given city. That killed the scene for the kinds of clubs I had been working in. I didn’t want to go on tour, so I looked for corporate A/V work in the area. 

Television Mobile Resources was a company in Florida, and with them I did a lot of trade shows and government work, including at Kennedy Space Center from 1997 on. 

We’d cover rocket launches, patch into NASA’s robotic cameras, and do internal news segments for aerospace contractors. Then I hooked up with the Golf Channel, and all their wireless was Lectrosonics. 

Later, I had been doing a lot of freelance ENG [electronic news gathering]. I also had my own kit, finally — eight channels of Lectrosonics. I had the SRa and SRb receivers, then the SMV transmitter and the SMQV, which was the double-battery version, and a tiny one called the SMa.

Your ENG work included storm-chasing. How did your gear hold up?

I was with [reporter] Matt Gutman from ABC covering hurricane Irma when it hit Fort Myers. I had him on a DPA lavalier mic under his raincoat, but the network wanted viewers to see the ABC mic flag on the handheld, so we used a plug-on HM transmitter. 

Despite the rubber seal it has around the XLR barrel, and it being inside a protective sheath, we’re talking about 100-mile-per-hour winds and rain going sideways, so some water got in there and it shut off to protect itself. I put Matt on a cable and kept going.

A couple of days later, we were headed to a nice neighbourhood that got hit hard, and I knew I’d want the HM. I had put it in a bag of rice, but now I took it out, opened the battery door, and just put it on the car dashboard to let the sun dry it. It dried out completely, I put batteries in, and it just fired up and worked like there had never been an issue. 

That’s been typical of other Lectro transmitters on the rare occasion they’ve taken water. I’ve never had to send anything in for a replacement. What’s great about it is, the housing is metal. You can throw these things against a wall, and they’ll still work. 

Now, we’re not really going to do that, but you know how it is — a lot is going on, you drop them, the talent drops them, a hop falls off the camera. Especially when you’re running around under crisis conditions, not working on a controlled set.

What is in your Lectrosonics rig now?

A lot of older stuff, frankly, because they got so much right the first time. I’ve historically used LMa transmitters for my boom operators’ hops, and equipped them with R1a receivers for IFB and communications. 

In my bag is an LT transmitter with a battery eliminator. I use it to send camera hops — one channel for reference is all they [camera operators] need. 

For talent, I have a handful of the SMWB wideband transmitters. I’d like to try some of the newest digital wireless Lectro makes, but just haven’t had the opportunity yet. Also, a sleeper piece of gear I love is the little time code recorder, the PDR.

What’s your application for the PDR?

Let’s say you’re getting dialogue or reaction from someone on a ride at a theme park. If the ride has a lot of movement, you need to bury a device very deep on them. 

Between that, the metal the ride is made of, and all the RF in the air the park uses for control and communications, it’s challenging to get signal from someone inside a ride. 

I put the PDR on them, get a bit of them with the boom at the beginning and end, then let the PDR record and write time code and give it all to post when we’re done.

Between theme parks and aerospace shoots, has range ever been a challenge?

I did sound for a documentary at the Daytona International Speedway. It was about the Ford GT-40, the car that beat Ferrari at LeMans. Did you ever see that movie with Matt Damon, Ford v. Ferrari? Well, this was a documentary about the same subject. 

I was up in the stands with my SRc receivers and a bow-tie antenna, and production wanted in-car audio for a vehicle that had a bunch of GoPro cameras on it. When the car is on the far side of the track, it’s almost a mile away, and there’s a building in between where they have the media centre. 

I affixed an SMQV transmitter where the A-pillar of the car meets the dashboard and pumped it up to 250 milliwatts [output power]. Even when the car was at its farthest point away from me, and even when it was blocked by the building, I had clean audio that didn’t degrade even when the RF meter dropped to one bar. 

I took some phone video switching between the car and my receiver and people couldn’t believe it. This was the first firmware version for the SMQV, no less.

Another occasion where the SMQV saved the day was a production involving a motor glider, which is a glider airplane that has a small engine and propeller as a backup. They wanted conversation inside the aircraft and asked me to put a field recorder in there — this was before the PDR was made, by the way. I told them, “No way. You’re going to hear nothing but noise.”

Instead, I miked the pilot and passenger with DPA 4071s, which have excellent background rejection, and once again used SMQVs at 250 milliwatts. 

My receivers were UCR411a. With the glider about 2,000 feet up, we got crystal-clear audio. I played it back for the talent when they got back on the ground, and they were blown away. They could hear each other on the playback better than when they were originally talking!

Has your experience mixing music in recording studios informed your approach to mixing for picture?

There are two big ways I think it has. First, I start paying attention to gain staging with the transmitter. That’s the equivalent of beginning with the mic preamp in the studio, and it’s an old-school approach — the device closest to the microphone should be hottest, then you need progressively less gain as you go down the signal chain. 

I see a lot of younger mixers just leaving the transmitter at whatever setting it was at and ignoring it. Second, I don’t like compression — though the companders in the Lectrosonics stuff are very transparent, I have to say, especially their newer gear. 

Instead, I’ll ride the faders on my recorder during a shoot. Not too much of course, but I’m always paying attention to peaks and being a subtle human compressor, and I get feedback about it that my mixes have this extra X-factor of sounding natural.

What is it about Lectrosonics gear that has seen you rely on it for decades?

As I said, I’ve been using Lectrosonics since that PBS station in the ’90s. Nothing is more solid when it comes to audio quality and RF performance. Clients who aren’t professional sound people know the brand — I’ve put in bids where the client had a budget for rental gear and stipulated “Lectrosonics only, none of that other s***”! 

Any electronics can get stressed in the Florida heat and humidity, but I’ve never had a problem I couldn’t solve by cooling a piece down or drying it out. When I need everyone on the same page in a high-stakes production, I’d never use anything else.